Newton's Third Law
by MsJadey
Summary: Interpolation and extrapolation of Nick, post Grave Danger. gen oneshot


**Title**: Newton's Third Law

**Author**: MsJadey

**Rating**: M

**Warnings**: Spoilers for Grave Danger, serious themes, language

**Summary**: Interpolation and extrapolation of Nick, post-Grave Danger.

**Disclaimer**: I write in the spirit of a community sharing its culturally significant stories. The characters, certain events, and Biblical quotes referenced herein did not originate from me. I will neither seek nor make any monetary profit from their use.

* * *

He measures the progress of his recovery by how closely he feels the ghost of his coffin around him. A good day is only a brief hesitation before reaching out to grab something off the table; a bad day is waking to find his soft quilt transformed into a slick plastic hand squeezing him against the mattress. It takes a lot of coffee to get through that panic attack, and though no one mentioned it the first time he was late, and nobody would, he's learned to set his alarm clock half an hour ahead just in case. 

He isn't sleeping all that well anyway. It's not bad enough to show, but bed hasn't been the sweet reward after a hard day it once was. For a week after, he kept slamming awake in the middle of a nightmare, body rigid and feeling every crushing inch of Plexiglas around him. He was in that box for less than a day, but it was long enough to train himself into the memory of it. He can trace its dimensions in his sleep.

He's come up with ways to cope, though. Adapting, using every skill he's ever learned to improvise a new life where the old one stopped working. He tried to tell himself once that he was "thinking outside the box", but the humour made his stomach hurt. Now he does it without thinking about it. It's more important to get the job done than to give it a name.

He keeps all the windows open, for one thing, letting fresh air in. Even if the air isn't fresh or the traffic's obnoxious, it's still better than stale, dizzy silence. He can't wear his favourite aftershave anymore, and he showers before bed because he's sick of the smell of his own sweat. He sleeps naked. It makes him feel vulnerable, but he feels free too.

The immediate aftermath was worse. The hell-week of adjustment right after he came home from the hospital, after he finally convinced his parents that he did want to stay in Vegas. Back when he felt the phantom sensation of ants running over his skin every minute, slept upright in his chair, and couldn't eat anything without tasting dirt.

In the end, he took a month off of work. No one complained, but he felt obliged to explain anyway. He owed it to them. Yes, he wants back on the nightshift more than anything. No, he's going to take the recovery slow. Of course he knows they're all happy to have him back. Thanks for the flowers, the cookies, the ice cream, the video games, and the chocolate-covered grasshoppers. Those last ones he didn't eat, but he's grateful that Grissom was aware enough not to give him ants.

He thanked them all, and sent them on their way. Told them very politely to get out of his hair. He needs them -- his friends, his family; he knows he'd never have gotten out of that box without them. He'll never have the strength to heal without them either. But he also needed time alone to deal with it all, to pull himself back into some semblance of Nick, rebuild the parts of him that died of oxygen deprivation, toxic shock, and heartbreak.

When he finally went back to work, it was as an emotional mix of steel pins, plaster cast, and Flintstones bandages. Most of it held against the impact of being an active CSI once more, but even though you never forget how to ride a bike, for a while it felt like someone had taken a wrench to his front wheel.

The first time he collected evidence, his internal organs flipped upside down. He hadn't even thought about it, about what it might do to him, until he was standing in the middle of a park at midnight, bagging a bloody sock and catching sight of something shiny lying a few feet away. It wasn't like he was there alone. It wasn't like he didn't have Warrick checking over his shoulder ever few minutes. It wasn't like he didn't trust them not to ever let it happen again. But he'd forgotten about that night in the parking lot, picking up the bagged Styrofoam cup, the strong arm and the strong smell, and then nothing. Everything that came after had obliterated insignificant details like those, until they all came racing back up his spine.

That's what it's like now. He's handled all the big stuff, conquering it or driving it back until later, and now he has to contend with those little moments that sneak up on him when he least expects it. Before, he never realized how many rooms are just _boxes_. They can have doors and windows and carpets and furniture, but in the end they're six walls and eight corners of geometric insanity. He isn't sure which is worse: the interrogation rooms that don't even try to hide how imposing and suffocating they are, or the falsely-open CSI labs where everything looks free until you realize you are forever inside, behind, and underneath glass.

That's why, planted-evidence paranoia aside, he needs the fieldwork more than anything else. He needs air, real outdoor air, and a horizon. Too many bad days in the lab focus on how much he hates having been a case himself, the man-hours on the equipment that were devoted to him. He should at least be grateful that he never required the use of Doc Robbins' talents, butthere are some dreams that sour even that.

He started having nightmares about the lab too, after he learned the full scope of the case: the light, the webcam, the ransom, and the race to the nursery. They didn't even have to show him the webcam feed for him to know exactly what it must have looked like. It didn't matter that they _wouldn't_ show him -- from the moment they told him it had been there, he's been picturing it in perfect detail. He sees himself, panicking and distorted, lit white then green, screwed-up face covered in ants. It's too horrifying to be embarrassing.

He even started channelling that horror into a hideous carousel of every _other_ possibility: Warrick, on the short end of a fifty percent chance, cramped into a space that Nick had barely fit. Would he even be able to move? Maybe Catherine, or Sara -- some caveman complex deep inside his brain recoils at the possibility of putting a woman through what no one should endure. God help him, maybe even Greg, who is too young and will always be too young to have a bad day in the field like that. Or Grissom. Could any of them have withstood that -- to see him, more than anyone else, down there? What would he have thought of the puzzle "how do you get out of a room with no doors"? Would he have been stoic and Zen, or would he have given up? Would he have expected them to abandon him down there with the bugs he pretended to prefer? Nick admires the man's self-control, but -- and he knows this from personal experience -- there's something about being kidnapped and buried alive that brings out the worst in you.

It was when he started picturing his mother down there that he realized he was hurting himself. He was getting trapped in his own imagination, so attuned as it was to reconstructing crime scenes. He had to stop himself from dwelling on every horrible facet of the nightmare.

The worst part of all, even in his massive litany of terror, was being recorded. Being watched, stared at from above -- it was Nigel Crane all over again. These are his friends, his colleagues, those he trusts above all else, but it sickens him deep inside to know they were observing him. Watching his misery. And shining that light on him, over and over -- it was a Chinese water torture he'd attributed to his kidnapper, not to his friends. He'd nearly shot off his own foot -- and maybe almost his own head -- trying to kill it; not seeing a light, but the dark, grinning face of an anonymous madman with an ether-soaked cloth. A brilliant madman to trick those closest to him into acting as torturers-by-proxy.

But he doesn't hate them, even irrationally. All it takes to dispel any misplaced anger is the memory of Catherine's voice shouting down the pipe and the first time he saw the foggy outline of Warrick through the coffin lid. After hours of torture, the pure sweetness of knowing they were there tore right through the protective resignation he'd been using to survive -- feeling real hope again had hurt so bad he'd almost shot his head off just to save himself the pain of losing it. Even that brief hesitation in their digging felt like a size-twelve work boot slamming through his heart.

And worse, when that final sick fucking twist of explosives left him alone in the hole, so close to free he could almost see sky again -- he thought he would die just like that, no gunshot required. When Grissom came down on the box he didn't feel any relief at all; just a sick certainty that this, like everything else, would taunt him and then be ripped away. It wasn't until he heard "Pancho!" that he was shaken out of mindless despair. The sheer absurdity of his father's nickname for him, coming from Gil Grissom's mouth, shocked him to the core. Because it was Grissom, not his father. His dad was miles away in Texas and Grissom was certainly not his father. Or was he? Sometimes it seemed like it, and now everything was strange and confusing. Was he dead in a box somewhere with his boss yelling at him -- _oh god, I must be late for work _-- or dead on Doc Robbins' table with his dad examining his heart?

But after one moment of absolute incomprehension, his brain cleared, snapped into game mode as he realized that Grissom was _here_, Pancho notwithstanding, and Grissom was well known for making everything okay.

He's never come so close to crazy as he did in those few minutes of abandonment, even in the hellish aftermath of readjustment when everything was a landmine waiting to happen. If he could break his life down into mathematical variables and chart them on a graph, between 33 and 34 on the x-axis would be a gut-wrenching freefall, then a slow, almost tortuous, but ever-upward slope. Even on a negative scale, it was all up-hill from rock bottom.

He doesn't usually like to slice life up like that, into special stages and well-defined boxes; scientist aside, he prefers to let his own life play out as it will and not dissect it or pull it apart. Boxes are for evidence, not people. But the physical metaphor of his coffin is too strong to ignore -- existing in it and in the month that followed was its own lifetime. It stands alone from the moment he woke up underground and banged his head on the ceiling of his own private hell to the moment he stepped out of Kelly's prison into the hot, dry Nevada afternoon. Who he had been before, who he was during, and who he is now are three different people, and he has to distance himself the first two because the only way back to Nick-before-box is through a godforsaken hole in the ground.

Sometimes the wheels still spin out from under him, reality reeling away faster than he can breathe. It started because of a particularly bad moment underground, when he'd heard the creaking of dirt shifting around him and was so certain they'd found him. Learning that it wasonlythe earth coming after him, getting revenge on him for invading it; knowing that he had been singing, not at rescue, but at slow, suffocating death -- it was agony. It had killed his intellectual faith in the scientific process to track him down and save him; it was too much pain to intellectualize any longer. From then on everything -- fire ants, hallucinations, and explosives -- it was all in the hands of God. That when he started questioning gravity.

He knew, _knew _that he was lying on his back, underground, deep enough to prevent him from opening the lid. No telling exactly how deep, but he was lying on his back in a box, lengthwise, underground, and those were the facts. Except that when he started to crack, he started to question. He lost his perspective. He was just in the ground, no context beyond that; he didn't even know if there _was_ an aboveground, and if those were ants or hellfire. Everyone keeps giving him credit for keeping his cool and doing his job, but they don't realize how much of that was instinct, how easy it was to start questioning everything. They know how long he was under, but they don't know how strange and twisted those hours were, feeling like he was hanging anywhere between Nevada and China.

So even now, sometimes, he finds himself asking which direction is up. It's not the kind of thing he would have considered before, but he can't help dwelling on his previous assumptions. After all, he also never imagined being buried alive in a Plexiglas coffin on top of explosives. It goes beyond questioning the everyday to figure out new leads on a dead-end case -- it comes down to questioning reality itself.

Those are his real scars. Not the bug bites, which cleared up, or the fading nightmares, but the growing pains of being a new person in the same old body. Like the bubble gum he can't quite enjoy the same way, or the beautiful sky he watches longer. He broods more than he used to, like he's somehow developed Stockholm Syndrome for silence. And his mild anger control issue has gotten worse. It's been a while since he watched the _Kill Bill_ movies, but he gets the feeling that if he ever meets Thurman, he'll punch the bitch in the face. She made it look way too easy.

It's not any one thing -- just a collection of little changes that add up to not the Same Old Nick anymore.

His mind keeps taking him back to a high school English teacher who loved a passage in the King James Bible and made them study it for a week in class. It was the one about "seeing through a glass, darkly". Maybe it's cliché of him to think of it, maybe it's just random word association and a lingering obsession with Plexiglas, but it dragged itself up out of his memory as one of the few things he ever paid attention to in English. And, somehow, it fits.

He remembered that the chapter's mostly about how good love is, but what really struck him were the eleventh and twelfth verses. He had trouble picking through the archaic sentence structure of the Bible his mother left at the hospital, but he got the gist of it.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

It's been a long time since he thought of himself as a child, but he can't deny that he's gone through some kind of life-altering event. He recalls that adolescence was nearly as traumatizing at times as being buried alive. And if anyone has looked through a dark glass, it's him. He lived inside of it, changed to fit it, and then damn well exploded out of it. The Nick who went in on the other side never left that box -- he died somewhere between shooting out the light and watching Warrick get off the coffin and walk away. But somebody is still here, in his shoes. And maybe he hasn't been face-to-face with God -- because Grissom doesn't actually count -- but he sure as hell knows more now than any normal person should have to.

Which is why, in the end, he had to visit Kelly Gordon.

That was the last act of his aftermath. After a month of coping, healing, and putting together puzzle pieces to answer the tragic riddle "Who am I?" he got into his Tahoe, rolled the windows down, and drove out to see the one person who might really understand everything he went through.

He expected nothing from meeting her; she was too wrapped up in her own problems to deal with his. He hasn't told anyone about meeting her either. They're all too angry with her to understand why he wanted to and it's okay if they don't -- he doesn't expect them to. They wouldn't realize that sitting there, watching her through the Plexiglas -- god, would he _ever_ look at that stuff the same way again? -- was a lot like looking at himself.

His job is putting criminals into prison. Cop, lawyer, judge, or CSI -- this has always been his path. He doesn't regret it and he doesn't really believe that Kelly was wrongfully convicted. What he does believe is that _she_ believes it. All that matters is that, in her mind, she has been taken from her life and put into a box buried far away from anything good. Her term is theoretically definite, but he remembers how hours can melt and flux like plastic in a fire when you spend too much time alone. So he doesn't want to forgive Kelly -- he doesn't need to. It was her father who put him down there and that's all there is to that. They found him well enough without her help.

It's not a question of forgiveness, or closure. Those answers Grissom is so fond of giving to grieving families can't help him because the who, how, and why were solved long before they dragged him out of the earth. He didn't go to that prison to get answers, but to give them.

His dark glass had cleared and opened, and he'd come to in the arms of friends. Sure, he can only sleep on his side with three pillows and the windows open, but he can still sleep. He gets sweaty in elevators after more than three floors, but he's free to walk down the sidewalk afterwards and breathe deeply. Sometimes he looks into a mirror and can't remember what he expected to see besides his own face, but he doesn't hate what's there instead. He doesn't know if Kelly will be able to say the same thing when she leaves. He wants her to.

The only thing he asked from her was an understanding that sometimes terrible, awful, unthinkable things happen, and sometimes they never entirely fade away, but they do eventually stop happening. Even if it felt like it, he wasn't in that coffin forever, and the only way he'll really fail to recover is if he forgets that. He can feel the invisible scars hovering around him for as long as he wants, as long as he knows deep down that's all they are -- invisible and harmless, memories of a box he left far, far behind.

He hasn't stopped thinking about her since he left her there. It doesn't interrupt his life or his work, but whenever he has a moment alone, he inevitably goes back to her in his mind. He remembers her anger, her sadness, her confusion. He remembers how tight and rigid she was sitting there, and imagines how free and happy she must have been before. He remembers the moment he left the prison behind, tasting the air as he walked through the parking lot. He remembers rolling up the car window. It wasn't any cooler; he just wanted to see if he could do it. He wonders what it will be like for her when she takes those same steps.

As long as she doesn't take more than scars with her when she leaves, he thinks she'll be okay.

He thinks he'll be okay too.


End file.
